Fifth Straight Year in the Beautiful Catskills

I think “finding literary community” has been an important “success story” for Writers as well as Participants at The Hobart Festival of Women Writers. We have created community among the nearly fifty writers who have participated in the Festival. Participants who have enjoyed our craft workshops return each year to participate with Writers they have enjoyed in past years. We have certainly brought new voices for lovers of literature to hear and read. – Cheryl Clarke

“One of the things most meaningful to me about The Festival is the serendipity of meeting other writers and forming a lively literary community. I hadn’t expected that so many unique and stunningly talented women writers would come to our Festival. I feel my own writing has been enriched by the exchange with this diverse community of writers.”
— B. Clarke

“Politics is not an isolated, individualist adventure. Women really need to emerge as a power to be the countervailing power to the men. And Eleanor Roosevelt’s really the dynamo and the spearhead of that effort.”
— Blanche Wiesen Cook

“The fact that her prose was published exclusively by small independently owned women’s presses was both a result of the major houses’ narrow perspective and the fact that Audre Lorde’s prose, particularly her myth-shattering essays, was instrumental in framing a changing reality for many women, primarily lesbian women (a readership long dismissed by the mainstream publishing world). ”
–Nancy K. Bereano

“A writer could spend a lifetime filling pages about the concept of home and its many definitions. Our mother is our first home, both physically and emotionally. Many of the complications of life spring directly from the memory of losing a primal home, whether that home was an actual place, or a parent, or both. Every break-up, estrangement, or emotional severance can contain a dim echo of its original impact.”
— Sandra Rodriguez Barron

“Often, people come to my practice wanting to be liberated from the oppressive grip of depression. I have found Poetry Therapy to be an important tool in discerning a viable way to come out of depression.”
– Marianela Medrano

The goal of this book is to encourage you to think about your own life, the kinds of stories you respond to, how they make you feel, and how those feelings relate to the effect you want your stories to have on your audience. – E. Nonas

” . . . most educational spaces for writers teach writers how to conform to certain conventions and norms, and that has its place. But my workshop will be a space for writers to surprise themselves and to transform all of us. ”
– Alexis Pauline Gumbs

The financial and physical uncertainty of living in a body without access to care or cure creates a kind of daily existential crisis, and that strange ride is a kind of emergency that so many people carry with them in their skins. We don’t often talk about the all-pervasive effect that these states of being have on our lives, past, present and future.

The Intensive Workshop is an opportunity for serious, committed writers to explore, to be challenged and to grow by working directly with an award-winning, published writer. Immerse yourself in the inspiration of Hobart’s mountain vistas and focus on your writing craft in a small group setting.